The No-B*llshit Guide to Reinventing Yourself 🗺️

📍 Coordinates: Bitcoin Jungle, Costa Rica.

📖 Reading Time: ~10 minutes.

🏴 Vibecheck: Dropping a bigger piece here today, a no-nonsense guide to personal evolution. It’s but a taste of something bigger we’ve been cooking up: Radical Redesign. We’re running a 10-day live journey, starting July 19, for courageous humans looking to expand what’s possible. If that sounds like you, come join us. Love and power, EB. ⚡️

“Do the best you can until you know better. Once you know better, be better.”

“You know, you’ve really developed the art of reinventing yourself… every time I see you you’re a different person…”

A friend and collaborator said this to me a few days ago. It was one of the best compliments I’ve ever received.

Reinventing yourself—what I call ‘identity-level transformation’—has been the core of my work and life for years.

It’s no mistake that I use the mythology of the Phoenix as the core symbolism in Phoenix Culture. The death/rebirth motif is an archetypal symbol of change.

This Chapter in the Book of Eric is not the only one I’ve had. In previous decades, I’ve gone through:

1. Jock
2. Skate Culture/Punk
3. Depressed/Anxious/Struggling Emo Kid
4. Stoner/Hippie
5. Militant Vegan/Vegetarian
6. Tech Startup Bro
7. Psychedelics-as-Identity
8. Plant Medicine Facilitator
9. Jungle Samurai (my favourite approximation of the present chapter).

Everything changed within those chapters. Everything. 

The people I hung out with, the way I spoke, my work, goals for the future, diet (the full range from raw veganism to carnivore/animal-based), appearance, hairstyles, body mass, emotional baseline, nervous ticks. 

The contrast is stark.

A few years ago, I was too depressed to get out of bed or eat for days, hopped up on pharmacological cocktails, thousands of dollars in debt, in abusive relationships, over-worked and over-stressed, unhealthy, uninspired. 

Now, I live in the jungle mountains of Costa Rica, in a beautiful relationship, building the projects of my dreams, the strongest I’ve ever been, with more money than I’ve ever had. I’ve become a leader and mentor to many, and continue to be an eager student in my own life. 

When I write about identity-level transformation, sometimes people think it’s hyperbole or metaphorical. For me this is a living, breathing reality. Changing who you are is possible. 

This is my no-bullshit guide to reinventing yourself.

1. Articulate an Activating, Inspiring Future

It begins with a vision. As clear and concise as you can conjure. 

In the liminal space between shedding one identity and stepping into a new one, sometimes the vision is murky. That’s fine. It manifests as a longing, a gut-level instinct that something is being called forth. 

Your only job here is to be courageous and clearly articulate the desired future. 

I say courageous because most people hold back at this step. They succumb to an entrenched fear of failure, and avoid committing to anything specific. For the ego, it’s better to avoid failing than to succeed. Be courageous, call your shot.

Make a list, put a timeline (6 months-1 year is good), and list the things you want to have, to be, and to do.

Most important is that your vision creates emotional activation.

You feel something when you think about it. This emotional charge is critically important.

Keep your vision present. You may have seen my recent article where I used Bing AI to envision what I’m embodying now. Make a vision board, write a sticky note, do whatever you need to keep your North Star in front of you.

2. Identify Actions & Activities That Move Toward the Vision

Chart the path from the Present to the Future. 

Based on your Have/Be/Do list: what do you need to do that’s completely new? What do you already do that you need to do more of? Less of? Drop completely? Practice? 

Your list might look like:

• Learn design to transition careers
• Get way more physical strength
• Study yoga
• Start a gratitude practice
• Move cities
• Find a community of musicians
• Buy a piece of art for your room

The guiding question is: how does the person who has/lives/is all the things you picture act? 

You might end up with something like:

• Sign up, and go to the gym 2x/week.
• Message 2 people I respect and have feedback calls with them.
• Sell my stuff so I can move countries.
• Go to 3 interest events this month.
• Create 1 new article/design a week and sign up for this course.
• Write a journal daily.
• Fix my sleep/wake cycle.
• Choose happiness.

Where are the gaps, and how do you take steps toward them? Best guesses are far better than nothing.

3. Psychological Death, Epistemic Humility, & Putting Everything Up for Grabs

This stage—grounding your vision into your daily reality—is where most people fall off.

Emotional instability, ego traps, disempowering narratives, and clinging of all kinds create a gravity for the-way-things-are, preventing you from hitting escape velocity to become-what-can-be.

One resource is using the emotional energy from your vision. Let the beauty, love, and excitement of the desired future infuse you with the willingness and soul force necessary to continue moving through the difficult process of transformation. 

The second part is not ignoring the obstacles, but not getting hung up on them. As a shaman and mentor of mine says, “No fear, no fascination.”

A few reminders are game-changing (though sometimes painful) at this stage:

• How you do anything is how you do everything. Reinventing yourself is reinventing everything. Pick anywhere and begin. Speak differently. Do things that scare you. Change your room. Listen to new music. Find new communities. Change the way you walk. Develop new routines.
• If you don’t like the person you are right now, you shouldn’t like the way of thinking/living that got you here. You can’t isolate one part of you and say that’s the thing that needs to change. There is no separation. Put everything up for grabs, all of it is on the table to be transformed.
• Humble yourself. Practice epistemic humility. If you’re not where you want to be, you’re missing something. Accept that your ideas are incomplete, and seek relentless feedback from reality. As a Zen maxim says, “You’re perfect just the way you are, and you could use a little work.” Get comfortable being awkward, being the beginner, making mistakes, upsetting people.
• Don’t overlook small changes. A haircut or new shirt work wonders in catalyzing the transition into a new identity. If you can get tiny wins, don’t overlook them.
• Cultivate ontological fluidity. Reshape your story of reality. The new person you’re becoming will see reality differently. How does the ideal future self view reality, life, meaning, purpose, relationships, morals, values, vocation, free time, etc? Write it down. You must step into a new grand narrative, if you don’t, the current story will reshape you back into the same person you are now. This is what looping is, the same conditions create the same results. Change the conditions.
• Accept psychological death. Have endless gratitude for the younger version of you, accompanied by mercilessly letting them go. The process of identity-level transformation is a death process. The person you are will die to the person you are becoming. Who you are now will no longer exist. Prepare yourself and walk boldly forward through the fires of change.
• Don’t let others anchor you. Some people will never update their model of you – you must be aware of this, accept it, and move forward. Everyone else will do it slowly. Getting feedback is helpful, but don’t base your identity on others, they are always lagging behind the bleeding edge of your own transformation. Become your own authority.

4. Massive, Relentless, Courageous Action

Let’s recap. So far, you’ve got:

• A compelling vision of the future.
• A best-guess roadmap of steps to go from here to there.
• The traps/emotional challenges/psychological pitfalls that will arise.
• There is only one thing that remains…

Massive, relentless, courageous action.

This is the training montage. This is literally and metaphorically drilling the behaviours, perspectives, and way of being of your future self into your bones so many times that it becomes who you are effortlessly. 

You’re mastering the skill of being yourself. 

Some decisions are easier than others. It’s easier to go through the awkward 2 weeks of a new hair style than it is to move across continents.

But the need for courage, commitment, and relentless action are the same for both. You need to decide to go to the barber just as you need to buy the plane ticket and sell your sh*t. 

It’s 1000 decisions and bold actions in service of your Vision. 

There was a point in your life where you couldn’t speak. Literally, you knew no language. Now you do. How? You may have forgotten, but you practiced language. I’m not saying this process has to be miserable, by no means, but it needs to happen.

You are learning the skill of being an entirely different person. It’s awkward. You will mess up, but do not give up.

Drill it. Practice being assertive. Develop the skill of joy. Eventually (both sooner and later than you imagine) your new perspectives, beliefs, morals, actions, habits, routines will become “second nature”. 

In reality, they will become your first and only nature. 

They will become who you are. 

Now you’ve made it.

5. Internal Milestones & External, Unprompted Reflections

How you can be sure that you’ve changed?

Deep changes take a long time to stabilize, and some aspects of change are easier to spot than others (easier to tell if you’ve put on muscle or lost weight than to know if you’re more assertive or resilient). 

There are two key indicators I use:

1. Accomplished Internal Milestones. If you were courageous, in Step 2 you should have defined a very clear Have/Be/Do list. The question is: are those present in your life now? Did you really put on 20lbs of muscle? Are you on the path to changing careers? Have you bought that piece of art for yourself? Did you take that trip? Are you happier and more excited about your life? Whatever your indicators were, see if you’ve done them. Some take much longer to materialize, and simply being on the path counts too. If you have accomplished some of these, really acknowledge this, soak it in, and celebrate! You turned a visionary desire into a living reality.
2. Unprompted, External Reflections. In my opinion, the more powerful indicator is receiving unprompted, external reflections from the world that align with your vision. Here’s a personal example: 3 weeks ago I was in the jungles of Mexico in an appreciation circle during our latest retreat. Each person was put in the ‘hot seat’, and everyone would give them a note of appreciation. One of the unprompted, external reflections I got from someone was in essence, “I appreciate how solid you are, you’re like a… jungle samurai.” A few people nodded in agreement. If you remember my ‘Envisioning the Future Self’ piece, ‘jungle samurai’ was the exact term I used. It went from an internal North Star to an external, unprompted reflection in a few months. Unbelievable! This is what I mean: do people or situations reflect the desires you’ve set, noticing that you’re happier, more engaged, doing different work, looking/feeling better, or responding to you in a different way? While you can’t control or manufacture these, they are powerful indicators. You don’t need external validation, but the reflections show what frequency you’re putting into the world.

6. Revisiting & Re-articulating the Future

There’s only one thing left to do once you’ve reached this point – start again!

While inhabiting a new identity and perceiving a new reality, you will inevitably have a new vision for the desired future. Why? Because your desires changed too. Your values evolved alongside you.

So sit down, envision and articulate the ideal future self, and continue the serious play of becoming yourself.

Radical Redesign

If the reality and possibility of identity-level transformation resonates, I am running a 10-day live experience called Radical Redesign.

We are going to go through this process together: crafting the vision, surfacing limiting narratives, creating the strategies to implement, and radically redesigning the life available to us.

It’s 10 days, and $25. It will lay the foundation for the next few years of your life.

Come play with us. I hope to you there.

With love, EB. 🫡